Understanding Death At Different Ages

Children's Concept of Death

Preschoolers:

Death is merely a deep sleep.  Children worry about the comfort of the dead person and are concerned that the dead person may be hungry, cold, or lonely.  Death is temporary, reversible, and caused magically.  Children at this age tend to respond in varied, often contradictory, and unpredictable ways.  They may be angry with the dead person for abandoning them or anxious that others may also leave them.  A preschooler may be convinced that some thought or action of his or her own caused the death.  Adults must be sensitive to changes in behaviour caused by the guilt feelings.

Ages six to eight years:

Death is conceived as a person.  If the child's magic is strong enough, death can be fought and mastered.  Death does not take young and healthy people.  Only the old and sick are too weak to hold death off.  The dead can still hear, eat, see and breathe.  This causes many fears about the fate of the corpse.  Children at this age may worry bout being trapped in coffins.  They are fascinated about what happens to corpses after death and may be preoccupied with decomposition and decay.

Ages nine to twelve years:

Children now know that what lives also dies.  They have let go of magical thinking and replace it with a higher order of logic.  Death is understood as normal and irreversible.  Dead people cannot be brought back to life.  They are concrete and objective in their reasoning.  They still may think that death will not happen to them until they are very old.  In fact, with luck, it is possible to escape death altogether.

Children at this developmental stage understand internal illness as a cause of death, as well as physical violence and accidents.  Their anxieties are more likely to be related to the physical consequences of death than to separation.  Physical causality is understood, so their fears may focus on bodily mutilation, being buried alive, and the physical process of death.  Because they understand the irreversibility of death, they may receive a comfort in the belief of life after death but still have difficulty visualizing a decaying body in a coffin and in heaven at the same time.  The concept of a soul is usually too abstract for an 11-year-old to understand.

Adolescence:

Death is final and irreversible.  It happens to everyone, including themselves.  Adolescents are as capable of abstract reasoning as adults.  They are concerned with the theological beliefs or explanations of life after death.  Death is remote and spiritual rather than concrete and physical. It is inevitable, but will not happen immediately.  Adolescents live for the moment and deny the possibility that death could interrupt any of their current or life plans.  Adolescents may take unwarranted risks when seeking thrills or impressing friends because they do not accept the reality of personal danger.  They may focus on the glory of death and may idolize a peer who has died.

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